Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Oh, Yes: One More Thing We Need

I forgot one thing we need. Because of the generosity of people, we have rice. In fact, we have so much rice that we bought a 44 gallon trash container just to store the rice. That was not enough space, so we have about fifty pounds in a bin. So rice is not what we need. WE NEED GOOD RICE RECIPES! Those you have cooked forever, not those in a magazine that call for sixteen exotic ingredients available only in expensive grocery stores in metropolitan areas.

We will be waiting, saucepan in hand.

What We Need At My Friend's House

Some of you might be saying that we need things like organizational skills, less clutter, and more space. And you would be right. All those, however, will come in good time, hopefully. What we need right now is plastic bags. WalMart, Kroger, SuperOne, Brookshire's, whatever. So if you have any you need to part with, please let us have them.

 And thanks.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Much Progress, Thanks to Many Helpers


Thanks to many volunteers, most of them from Immanuel Baptist Church here in Marshall, we are getting closer to being open. Last Saturday, March 5, about thirty folks from IBC braved cool, almost cold temps to come en masse and work. Carrie and Jeff Bolt are the ringleaders for this mission group. Carrie has been here many days, scraping and painting. The white accents and porch that are now clearly visible in the picture are the work of Carrie and friends, mainly Carrie.

The deck (not visible in this picture), the ramp, the posts, and the back porch are the work of Jimmy Ford and his helpers. The pastor, Carlton Burris, installed a kitchen sink faucet very handily, as did David Harber and Philip Johnson with the electrical stuff. And this is my very favorite, because I absolutely detest this job: Carolyn Curry cleaned the toilets. Many others helped in many ways, and I apologize for leaving your names off--blame it on my being 72. That is as good an excuse as I have. Today we had a group of six (I think--they were moving too fast to count well) ETBU students who elected to stay here and work during their Spring Break just to help us!)

We owe a great debt of gratitude to all these folks.

We are just about ready to call the Health Department folks to come inspect the kitchen. Then we can open.

The picture was taken last week sometime. We need to take another now to show the beautiful trees budding and blooming in the background. Spring is in full bloom in East Texas. If we can survive the change to Daylight Savings Time, work will continue.

The picture below was taken when the able carpenters were removing the wall in front of four windows, covered sometime in the dim, distant past. The windows were painted black. After much useless scraping and several broken panes we finally got some stripper for the students to work on them today, and now the sunlight is flooding in, plus the view of the fields and trees is lovely.


Pray for the people of Japan.